“Perhaps. Oh, I don’t know what to think. She was wronged in her marriage, I can accept that. I don’t like how she reacted to it but what’s done is done. I’ve met her and yes, I admit that I liked her well enough, though she wears a little too much powder and paint. I had hoped she might be a steadying influence on Charlotte, being older, though that has come to nothing, of course. As for her killing her husband and her lover ... oh, Theodore. When it’s all put down in logical lists, I can see it very clearly. It is obvious. She is a strong suspect. The very strongest, indeed. I told Charlotte that she was a murderer and I believed it when I said it to her. Then I picture the woman that I know and it all becomes fuzzy and unpleasant.”
“You are too nice. You simply don’t want to believe it.”
“That is true. I do not.”
“Well, it’s lucky for the investigation that I am such a calm, cool, rational, hard-hearted sort of fellow, then, who has no finer feelings to speak of. Might I add how ravishing you look tonight, my dear? If I had a heart, it would surely melt at the first sight of you.”
“You flatterer, you.”
“Back me up, Smith. Tell my wife she is a vision of beauty, if you will.”
Smith tutted again, and said, “Sir, you don’t deserve her.”
“Ouch. Yet the truth hurts. My lady, are you ready?” He extended his arm and she rose to her feet.
“What has prompted all this display of affection?” she asked as they descended the stairs.
He paused before answering in a serious, quiet tone. “I am not sure. Perhaps it’s all these society-types with their affairs and their secrets, their murders and their spite, that makes me truly appreciate what I have right here.” He bent his head and murmured a few words into her ear, and she felt quite flushed about the cheeks by the time they entered the dining room.
Luckily the room was dim, lit tonight only by candles, and anyway, Charlotte was there, and she was full of information to share from her reluctant visit to Octavia Dymchurch.
CHARLOTTE WAS FULL of information, certainly; but she was lacking in enthusiasm to share it. Adelia tried to reassure her that she had done the right thing, but Charlotte brushed off her platitudes and took her seat with a morose attitude. She didn’t even speak until the first course had been served. They were eating late, and Adelia was hungry, but Charlotte picked at her food and pushed it around her plate.
“Well, I don’t know,” she said at last.
“You don’t know what?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking in agreeing to your plan. You forced me into it, I suppose. She was astonished to see me at her door. She received me in her usual reception room, very promptly though she had no reason to admit me at all. And she told me so. She said she had not expected to see anyone ever again. I told you that she knew, very well, what society must now do to her, and how she should expect to be treated.”
“How did she seem when she said that?” Adelia asked.
Charlotte shrugged with an almost sulky air. “How would you expect her to seem? She was irritable, morose, then angry by turns, but accepting. I told her that I valued her friendship and wanted to offer sympathy to her in her current plight. She laughed at me!”
“Why ever would she do that?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it was because she didn’t actually believe me? She certainly looked as if she didn’t believe me, anyway. No one else has been to see her. I felt awful, exposed. She reminded me that I risked my own reputation by even being there at all, and suggested that I leave immediately.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I should have done, but no, I was mindful of what you’d asked me to do and so I stayed. I told her lie upon lie. They stuck in my throat. I am so tired of deception. I don’t know how people do it.”
Adelia wondered if Charlotte meant more than she seemed to. She was tired of deception? Did she mean the lies she was weaving around herself and the man in the hooded cloak? Adelia had not forgotten that she needed to address that matter.
“I think it is like a muscle,” Adelia offered. “Habitual liars become accustomed to it.”
“I should hate to end up like that. Anyway, I told her that I cared nothing for society’s gossip, either from the artistic circles or the more staid ones, and that I cared only for her wellbeing, especially as she was widowed and alone, and I told her that I thought it was a disgrace that the past should have emerged now, and I asked her if she knew why.”
“And?”
“And she simply said that she didn’t know but that it was unfair and cruel.”
“What is her relationship to Lady Purfleet?”
“The same as anyone’s. Distant, measured, and now of course it’s quite, quite gone. Utterly severed. She knows that she has been cast out.”
“But does she blame Lady Purfleet?” Adelia insisted.
“I really can’t tell. I suppose that she must. She was rather unwilling to be drawn on the matter and I can understand why. Maybe you should visit her, mama, and then you can be sure of getting the answers that you really want,” Charlotte said crossly.
“I am sorry. I am just probing so that we don’t miss anything. It’s not a criticism of you, at all, and I am very pleased that you went. What else did
